Editorial, Issue 19.1
How to Cite: Killingley, D., King, A., & O’Brien-Kop, K. (2025). Editorial. Religions of South Asia, 19(1), 1-3. https://doi.org/10.1558/rosa.33540
This issue has only three articles, but they range from northeast to southwest, and from the sixth century to the present. Two of them are illustrated with photographs which are highly relevant to their subject matter and essential to their presentation. The unusual number of pictures made it difficult to include more articles.
In ‘Sixth-Century Miniature Valabhī Shrines from Southwest Bihar: A “New” Early Pāśupata Site and the Beginning of Mainstream Nāgara Temple Architecture’, Fiona Buckee examines the archaeological wealth of a village, Maṭar, dominated by a hill crowned with the octagonal stone temple of a goddess, Mā Muṇḍeśvarī. Her main concern is not with this massive temple but with a number of miniature temples carved in stone found in the village below it, which she dates on stylistic evidence to the sixth century. Like some rock-cut temples, they are durable representations of perishable wooden structures, and thus are valuable as records of the architecture of their period. Buckee also describes the iconography of the figures carved in the miniature temples, which show a predominance of Pāśupata Śaivism. The article is illustrated with a profusion of photographs and drawings showing details of both architecture and iconography. It ends with an indication of more work to be done, and unanswered questions: were these miniatures votive offerings, funerary monuments, architects’ models, or what? Whatever their original purpose, Buckee puts them to good use in reconstructing the development of what is termed Mainstream Nāgara temple design.
Still in the eastern Ganges basin, in West Bengal not far from Bihar, the next article deals with literary sources. ‘From Bandit Raja to Exemplary Devotee: Vaishnav Accounts of the Kingdom of Bishnupur’ by Deepashree Dutta takes us to the time of the expansion of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism from the sixteenth century onwards, and even to the nineteenth century when versions of the Bengali Madanamohanabandanā were being written down and printed. This is a folk epic with many variants, or rather a genre of poems all dealing with the same narrative theme. Madan Mohan, whom these poems praise, is a form of Kṛṣṇa, with a temple in the city of Bishnupur, the capital of a small kingdom. As represented in the poem studied here, Madan Mohan is intimately connected with the rise of this kingdom as a centre of Vaiṣṇava devotion under the eighteenth-century raja Bir Hambir, and with its decline when a later raja was obliged to pawn the image to a Kolkata merchant. Bir Hambir is also remembered in Vaiṣṇava tradition as a bandit king who stole a load of Vaiṣṇava texts, leading to his conversion and his kingdom’s short-lived prosperity; this better-known narrative is also studied in the article as a prologue to the story of Madan Mohan and as an example of Vaiṣṇava hagiography.
The third article, ‘Serpent Worship and the Pulluvans: Cult and Ritual Performance’ by Reshma Suresh and Preeti Sharma, brings us to contemporary Kerala, and the cult of snakes as protectors both of individuals and of families, and as protectors of Kerala itself. Here too there are miniature sculptures, of partly anthropomorphic snakes and of their dwellings, placed in groves sacred to these deities. The article describes the ritual of sarpathullal, performed to ensure the prosperity of a family by propitiating snake deities. This involves the setting up of a sacred space with a canopy or pandal, floor drawings (kalam), which are mainly but not exclusively the work of women, music and possession by snake deities. Possession is the role of young girls, who have prepared for it by a period of dietary purity; it is manifested by their convulsive and serpentine movements. Unlike the rituals in temples devoted to snake deities, which are the work of Brahmins, sarpathullal is performed by Pulluvans (the men) and Pulluvatis (the women) who specialize in this ritual and in the less elaborate pulluvan pattu, in which snake deities are propitiated with music. Like many traditional musicians, they rank low in the caste hierarchy, and there is a complex relationship between them, the Nairs who are their principal patrons, and the Brahmins. With declining belief in the divinity of snakes, pulluvan pattu is coming to be supported as a matter of heritage and tourism. The article complements Amy Allocco’s article on snake worship in Tamil Nadu (RoSA 7: 230–48); a notable difference is that in Tamil Nadu, ‘the ritual propitiation of nāgas is overwhelmingly the practice of women’ (p. 234), while in Kerala men are active both as ritual practitioners and as patrons.
These three articles show different ways of spelling Indian words in roman script, which some may find problematic or possibly incorrect. RoSA’s policy is not to require exact romanization in articles arising from disciplines in which it is not usual, such as history or anthropology, but only in those using literary sources in Asian languages. This leaves many borderline cases, and the editors are usually happy to allow authors discretion, including the possibility of using exact romanization and popular spelling in different contexts in the same article. In some cases where popular spelling is used, it is appropriate to add the exact romanization where a word or name first occurs. Often this will be a Sanskrit form, which is useful as an identifier for readers unacquainted with the source language; for instance, a reader may find Bengali job strange until it is explained as yava, ‘barley’. On the other hand, we have no wish to impose Sanskrit as the master key to all South Asian languages, or even to all Indo-Aryan ones.
Sometimes the difference between exact and popular spelling is referred to as spelling with or without diacritics, but that is not the only difference between, say, Kṛṣṇa and Krishna. Popular spelling may present inconsistencies, such as the use of either t or th for the interdental stop in words from Tamil or Malayalam, or the use of either v or b, or either y or j, in those from Bengali. These inconsistencies too are acceptable in RoSA, so long as a word is spelt the same in each occurrence, unless there is some reason for the difference. Practice may change, as technology makes diacritics easier to apply, and they are already becoming more familiar to general readers. If Māoris can have their macron, as they often do in print and online, perhaps rājās should have theirs. Practice in RoSA may change in the coming years, depending largely on the practice of our authors and the recommendations of our anonymous reviewers.
